Default Apps

A small GTK4/libadwaita app for choosing which applications open your files and links on Linux. It is a graphical front end for what xdg-mime default does.

• Default applications: one-click choices for web browser, file manager, terminal, code editor, text editor, PDF, email, images, video, music and archives.
• All file types: every MIME type that an installed app declares, with search.

Install

Tagged versions publish a .deb, an .rpm, an Arch package and an AppImage on the releases page.

System	Command
Debian 13+, Ubuntu 24.04+	sudo apt install ./default-apps_*.deb
Fedora	sudo dnf install ./default-apps-*.rpm
Arch Linux	sudo pacman -U ./default-apps-*.pkg.tar.zst
Anything else	chmod +x Default_Apps-x86_64.AppImage, then run it

The AppImage bundles GTK 4 and libadwaita and needs glibc 2.39 or newer.

Building the packages yourself

Each package has to be built on the distro it targets.

cargo install cargo-deb && cargo deb                                        # Debian, Ubuntu
cargo install cargo-generate-rpm && cargo build --release && cargo generate-rpm   # Fedora
cd packaging && makepkg -si                                                 # Arch
packaging/appimage.sh                                                       # AppImage

Run the PKGBUILD from packaging/, not from the project root. An AppImage only runs on systems whose glibc is at least as new as the build machine's, which is why releases are built on Ubuntu 24.04.

Build and run from source

Requires Rust, GTK 4 and libadwaita 1.5 or newer.

cargo run --release

How it works

Choices are written through GIO to ~/.config/mimeapps.list, the same file xdg-mime default writes. You can check any result from a shell:

xdg-mime query default application/pdf

Grouped entries set several MIME types at once. For example, Web browser sets x-scheme-handler/http, x-scheme-handler/https and text/html. The groups are defined in the SPECIALS table at the top of src/main.rs.

Terminal

Linux has no standard "default terminal" setting. The choice is stored under x-scheme-handler/terminal, which most desktops do not read by themselves. To use it, launch your terminal through a lookup, for example in Hyprland:

  hl.bind("SUPER + Return", hl.dsp.exec_cmd("gtk-launch $(xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/terminal)"))

Files without their own type

.ini, .conf, .env and similar files are plain text as far as the system is concerned, so they follow Text editor rather than Code editor.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.